Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Blythe

THE YEARS BEFORE BLYTHE WERE A KIND OF beautiful limbo, sticky with juice boxes, scented with leaf mold at Wissahickon Park where I walked the babies, book-ended by the hordes of Catholic schoolchildren in their uniforms who flitted down the hill in the mornings, drawn by the ponderous bells, and dispersed in the afternoons like handfuls of moths. Sue and Mackenzie would press their faces to the window and watch the children pass with toddlers’ fixed awe, and I would watch my girls and think with a fierceness I still sometimes feel, Not yet. When I’d remember the law firm where I was supposed to return to work, panic like a cold finger would press my heart, and I’d think the same thing: Not yet, not yet, not yet.

My husband tells me I romanticize those years, that in reality I was lonely and wept a lot and complained about betraying my principles by being a lowly housewife. He claims I called the girls little vampires, sucking the life out of me with their constant need. His version would explain the electric jingle of my nerves the day before that first poetry class, why all afternoon I caught the girls watching me carefully, as if they were afraid I’d suddenly explode. The class that evening seemed at once the most difficult thing I’d ever attempted and the most immensely silly. It was, of course, Sam’s idea. I had been absently filling scraps of paper with the words that bubbled up in my brain as I cleaned the house, and Sam had found them, and enrolled me in the class for my birthday.

“Harriet Buxbaum,” he scolded after I’d refused his gift. “You have talent. And you seem so tired. Your very soul seems tired.” True, I was deeply tired, but I believe I would have skipped the class entirely had Sam not come home that night with a weary pale face and a briefcase of papers he still had to wade through before sleeping. I kissed him, smelled the law firm on his skin, and was chased out of the house more by a desire to never return to that life of codicils and affidavits than by anything else.

On the drive from Manayunk to the University of Pennsylvania that night, the streets seemed made of wet tar, and inside the building the corridors smelled of mushrooms and raincoats. I was in such a flutter of panic I could barely clutch my pencil or look at the other students in the circle about me. All I wanted was the warm effacement of home.

When the room had filled, the teacher, a slight man with a quivery Vandyke, began rustling his papers and hemming to begin. Before he could, though, the door opened again. A subtle shifting in the chemistry of the room; like everyone else I found myself looking toward the doorway. There, smiling, stood a fashion model. Surely a mistake. I waited for someone to tell her that the life-drawing class was down the hall, but the woman stepped inside. She was tall, her dark hair shot with copper and studded with tiny white flowers.

This was Blythe Cantor, extremely thin back then and making one of her brilliant entrances. She looked nothing like anyone I had ever known; my familiars were floury types, wholesome and good. My friends, my family, potato knishes all.

“Poetry?” Blythe said in a husky voice.

“Yes,” said the instructor, pulling at his bowtie. “Please, sit.”

Blythe glided across the room to fold her long self into a chair beside me. I felt resentful at the scent wafting from her, cigarette smoke and perfume like some overblown peony about to shiver apart. When I looked at the frumpy people about me, I knew this woman had no right to be in the room. We were serious poets. She could be only a dilettante. A WASPy poetaster. She seemed raw in the way silk can be raw, and still shimmery, elegant.

That’s when I felt my ambitions begin to solidify, if only to defend them against fakers like this woman.

So I fumed until the teacher began to speak, and Blythe leaned over to me, green eyes brilliant with tears. She whispered, “Lord. Lord. I am so very frightened. You’ll be my friend, won’t you?” It was only when I smelled bourbon on her breath and watched one of her flowers unpin itself and fall down her collar that my heart fell for her with a decided plunk, the sound of a stone dropping into water. I squeezed her hand. Blythe wouldn’t let go, not throughout the entire hour, though I had to take unruly notes with my left hand, or even afterward in the beer-stinking undergraduate bar where we’d fled after class was over.

I had planned on going home directly after class — I knew Sam was waiting for me — but that night seemed to ring with a new kind of freedom, and so I followed her. The bar was so dark that at first all I could see of Blythe was a series of sparkles: eyes, necklace, glossy lips. We perched on our stools, and, over the first round of stingers — her choice — we found out that our children were the same age. She lived in Merion, a place that evoked Tudor-style manors and tennis courts and Katharine Hepburn; we were renting at the ridge of a steep hill between Manayunk and Roxborough, where old men would sit on their porches in their wife-beaters and drink homebrewed beer from mason jars. From her clothes it was clear that Blythe had few money worries, while Sam and I lived a series of small economies, our law school debts enormous, my salary gone when Mackenzie was born.

That night we talked and talked. Even then, Blythe had the ability to look at you as if you were the most stunning person in the world, and I, who had spent years as a ghost, basked in this new sun. We discovered that I had been in law school with a cousin of hers; she remembered visiting my parents’ candy store when she was a little girl; I had an uncle who once worked in her father’s investment company. With every particle of ourselves that we brought up we found a connection, a subtle link. I know now that if one digs enough one can find such confluences with practically anybody, but that night, under the spell of her magnetism, those connections seemed miraculous.

“Do you know what this means?” said Blythe. “Harriet, we’re destined to be best friends.” She clasped my hand and kissed it. Then she frowned. “I should tell you something before we fall madly in love, of course, which we will. It’s just that I’m probably crazy.”

“Me too,” I said, tipsy and laughing. “The girls drive me nuts all day long.”

“No,” said Blythe. “I mean I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve tried to kill myself three times. In July, I left my littlest son in the car and tried again. Bridge. I came home from the hospital a week ago. I’m only in this class because my shrink said poetry is good for me.” She rolled her glass in her hands and gave me a strained smile. “Now that you know, you don’t have to be friends with me. I’ll understand.”

But my whole good self had cracked open that night like a walnut; I felt fresh. Blythe was so little like me — plain, quiet — that she seemed like hope embodied. Besides, other than a maniacal professor in college who began hooting like an owl during an anthropology class and had to be escorted from the room, I’d never known anyone who was actually clinically insane. I thought of Sam, my gentle parents, my sensible activist friends. “Oh, Blythe,” I said. “I don’t think there’s been enough madness in my life.”

Blythe raised one eyebrow. “Careful what you wish for,” she said. Then she grinned and kissed me on the temple and raised her glass so that the liquid swung in the light. She said, “To us.” She downed her drink, wiped her mouth with a delicate pinky finger, and signaled for more with a coy little wink at the bartender.

A FEW WEEKS LATER ON THE LAST moderate afternoon of the year, my girls and I were paddling around the Cantors’ pool like ducks. It was a chilly day and fog lifted breathlike from the heated water, but Blythe lay on her chaise longue in a bikini that showed off her smooth waist and lovely small breasts. It seemed vaguely obscene to see how eagerly her nipples pushed against the fabric. I tried not to look.

That day, Blythe’s sons hovered around their mother, small satellites. Tom carefully conveyed ice cubes from the kitchen in silver tongs, to deliver them one by one to his mother’s glass of vodka like an officiant. Bear, the baby, was playing with his blow-up floaty at Blythe’s feet, from time to time patting them as if reassuring himself that she truly was there. Both boys wore a calm film over their faces like plastic wrap. Sometimes when the film slipped I saw fear beneath, and I had to look toward my own babies: Mackenzie, three, strawberried by the sun, pudgy little Susan, a joy.

I spun Mackenzie in the water and when I looked up, Blythe was blowing twin strands of smoke from her nostrils and frowning at us. “I could never have girls,” she said. “I don’t know how my mother did it. Three girls. Hell on Earth.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “My girls are sweet. They’re going to be my best friends someday.” Mackenzie squeezed my neck furiously and breathed her wet breath into my ear.

Blythe smiled, said, “I’m sure. But girls are just so needy. I had to sleep in my mother’s bed until I was almost sixteen. Plus, all the world wants to get into their panties, and you have to protect them, even from their own fathers and uncles and grandfathers. Boys can practically raise themselves. At least with them the Oedipus complex thing is simple. Screw Mommy, kill Daddy. Easy enough.” She laughed.

The four children all paused and looked at Blythe, but she lowered her glasses and winked at them and stretched like a great sleek cat. They returned to their play. Only I could have taken this seriously, and I wasn’t about to ask her to stop talking like this: nobody I knew was ever so reckless, and it filled me with a kind of ecstatic terror. When I looked toward the kitchen, I saw Pritch, Blythe’s husband, moving behind the window, wearing an apron and making dinner. He was a stocky man with the face of a Boston terrier, condensed features and bulging eyes, and I always expected his tongue to loll pinkly out of his mouth on a hot day. I feared him a little, for no reason I could figure out, and knew if he heard his wife saying such things before the children he would grow angry in his quiet, flushing way. I said, “Blythe. Maybe now’s not the time.”

“Oh, Harriet,” said Blythe. “We’ve both lived through all that feminist crap, probably even joined some of those clubs.” I blanched: I’d been the president of the Feminist Alliance in college. She said, “You were a lawyer, I did advertising. And here we are, housewives. No matter what we choose to do from now on, that’s what we are. We won’t be taken as seriously as the boys. We’ll be inferior, even if we could write rings around them. Which we can.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I believe the cream rises to the top.” I really did, back then.

Blythe carefully put out her cigarette. “Not in America, darling,” she said at last. “Here, the scream rises to the top. Home of the squeaky wheel, land of the knave,” and she laughed, pleased with her rhyme.

I went underwater to think. When I came up, I pushed my springy hair from my eyes. “Fine,” I said at last. “Then scream.”

Blythe gave a funny smile. “I intend to,” she said. She stood and walked to the diving board. Bouncing a little, she raised her arms and grinned, and then, despite all of my expectations to the contrary, she gave a rather clumsy dive, shaping herself like a candy cane and dropping deep with a splash.

I NEVER FELT COMPETITIVE WITH BLYTHE. I was skinny and small and plain, far poorer, far less charming. I’d never been to Europe; I’d never eaten escargot. My mother was from a small village in Latvia, my father only finished three months of college. Blythe’s family could recite all their ancestors since the Mayflower. I was not in the least the magnet for strangers’ eyes that Blythe was, with her stunning looks, her tight clothes.

Yet, for a long time, Blythe was a horrendous poet, writing song lyrics and thinking they were lovely. I had to tutor her, and I held tight to the small comfort of this superiority. In our class, I was the teacher’s pet, the one who could give moderate critique, the one whose poems he held up to the rest of the class as examples of anaphora, ellipsis, tone. And I would allow myself one tiny lick of judgment, like a child with a secret lollipop, when Blythe would sit across from me in the bar and breathe out the stories about her lovers; the undergraduate’s sweaty garret, the poetry teacher’s lust for clamps and rubber tubing, the way her shrink’s head resident (Blythe’s shrink refused to have sex with her) delighted in the cold examination table on his buttocks. I would never do any of these things myself, but did have a voyeur’s delight in hearing about Blythe’s doing them. In those days she seemed the distillation of life, and I felt some of my own returning, breath by breath, in her presence.

We grew close, then closer. L’amour fou, Sam called it, with a wry look on his soft face; folie à deux. One night in bed after a dinner party where the tiniest derogation had sent Blythe into a frenzy of sorrow (Blythe’s a princess, someone had said, and her whole face had crumpled), my husband assessed my friend with affectionate exasperation. “Like a Chihuahua,” he said. “Precious, trembling, breakable. She’s skinless, that girl.”

But I clicked my tongue and pulled my pillow from under his head. “You have it all wrong,” I said. “She’s something wild and sensitive and overbred. Like some Arabian stallion or something.”

“She can’t be a stallion, she’s a girl. You mean a mare,” said Sam, laughing.

But I was thinking of the way Blythe seized life with two greedy hands and gobbled, the bell-like laugh, the conviction in her voice when she spoke of her former sadnesses. I said quietly, “That’s where you’re wrong,” and wouldn’t respond even when Sam put a hand on my waist in apology.

Our class ended, the long winter passed, and in the spring Blythe and I both signed up for advanced poetry. Something subtle had been shifting in my friend for a few months: she had begun to come over during my children’s naps when I tried to clean the house, and sat at the table, twittering gaily about small things until Mackenzie and Susan woke and called to me from their rooms. One cold day she brought over a frosty fistful of crocuses, and while she talked her eyes followed me whenever I moved. I wondered about Blythe’s boys, if she’d left them alone, but knew that she had the money for a nanny. Not even Blythe, I hoped, would leave them alone, I thought, and hated myself for doubting her.

Then, the phone call in the middle of the night when, in the bolt-upright moment just before the phone rang, I knew it was Blythe, and that there was something wrong.

“Hello,” I said, but she was already talking, her voice vibrant in the dark.

“Harriet, Harriet, I’ve done it,” she said. “You have to see.” And before I could respond, I heard her drop the phone, her footsteps running from the room.

“Sam,” I whispered, putting the phone back in the cradle. “I think there’s something wrong with Blythe.”

“She’s crazy, dammit,” he muttered.

I had almost fallen back asleep when I heard the squeal of tires around a corner, and I ran downstairs in my pajamas. Through the screen I saw Blythe’s car ram the curb and narrowly miss the crabapple in our minuscule yard. The car ground to a stop and, its headlights still on, Blythe burst from the driver’s seat and hurried up the walk. Her hair was wild and her nightdress eerie in the stream of brightness and shadow. I cringed, expecting the lights to come on in the neighbors’ houses, but this was a place used to teenagers’ heavy metal past midnight, where neighbors inserted themselves into marital spats through the open windows of houses. Blythe’s behavior didn’t warrant a dog barking. She leaped the steps and thrust a paper in my hand. “Read it,” she said and gave a little crow. Then she grasped the poem back out of my hand and said, “No. I have to read it. It’s the performance that counts.”

Blythe stepped down onto the lawn and tilted the paper into the headlights’ beam. She let the paper drop so it floated down, and raised her arms so her sleeves were filled with light. And then she declaimed her poem at high voice. The neighbor’s beagle bayed along with her: she swept her arms up and out of the light, then back in, out, in. She was conducting the midges, the wind along the rooftops, the Schuylkill glimmering at the foot of the hill, I thought. Later I would read the poem itself and think, Eh, but in her mouth that night the words were full of needles and music.

I watched Blythe, so gorgeous and fluttering in her iridescent nightgown, a winged thing, and said, “God.” I had never been religious, and even if I had been, my God would have been much more ancient and angry than Blythe’s prim Episcopalian one, but still, I sensed the hand of something vast in this swift transformation.

When Blythe clasped me about the neck at the end, I thought I heard her say something strange over the wind and the idling engine: Oh, Mother. Later I dismissed what I heard and climbed back into bed to fall asleep, happy for my friend.

BLYTHE AND I TOOK SHOPPING trips with the children, long walks, and soon we began to spend mornings in our separate houses on speakerphone to read a poem aloud (me), and to talk about additions to pieces (her). She’d been to the galleries downtown where she’d seen performance art for the first time, and she wanted badly to create her own. Blythe’s new subjects were fanged, bloodthirsty: insanity, suicide, adultery, incest, masturbation, wanting to kill her own children. She wrote things so internal they still had the slick and beat of an organ when they came from her.

“Listen, Harriet,” she’d say. “I know what I want to do so well. I want to mix my words with movement, you see? Visuals. Public, not static. In the moment. I want to crack open the words so people can step in. I want to give them to you, not just present them on a paper. I want whole rooms full of naked women smeared with blood, you know?” Her voice was hushed, and we held the moment until a child shrieked somewhere. The silence broke, and Blythe laughed at herself, at her solemnity, at my speechlessness.

Blythe was making up what she was doing as she went along. She began to work with food, smearing the dark red jelly her mother made on her face as she chanted; making an igloo of the housewife’s best friend, frozen peas, and saying a long prayer-poem; shoving a grape into her mouth with each new line of a dialogue about her sons so that she almost choked herself at the end. She showed me her food log, hardbound sketchbooks in which she had noted every morsel that passed her lips from age fifteen to twenty-one, which stopped abruptly when she tried to kill herself for the first time (aspirin, in her parents’ pool house, she said, with a low laugh). She watched me as I read parts of it, growing nauseated at the annotations beside the biggest binges: Nasty, nasty, hog beside three cheeses-teaks and a case of Coke; Filthy bitch beside entire red velvet cake.

“I want to use these,” she said. “I’ll record these entries and play them over a loudspeaker and eat an entire picnic of food in front of people until someone throws up.”

“Jesus,” I said, which sometimes seemed like the only thing I could say.

I admired how Blythe used her body, the shock of her, but there was too much Milton and Frost in me for my own stabs at such dramatics to be anything but undignified. While Blythe created new pieces at a fevered pitch throughout the summer and fall, I wrote of gardening and politics, of sense and memory, of things safely domestic. I saved the secret thrill of transgression for Blythe’s work, proud to help her birth her strange little creatures, because it was midwifery. I was the one to contact the galleries, to drive Blythe to the theaters, to call the press, to organize. I was the woman behind the camera for the videos of her performances, Blythe’s very first audience. All the while I scribbled poem after poem in the ragged notebooks I salvaged at the end of my daughters’ school year, and only dared to show Blythe the best.

SOON THOUGH, BLYTHE BEGAN to sleep very little and ate nothing, sipping only what she called her “magic potion,” a Bloody Mary with extra vodka. I could see the ridges of her back through a cardigan. And in November, fourteen months after we’d met, there came another midnight call. Blythe was sobbing this time: “I’ve finished the best, I’ve finished Darkling. I’ve made a sculpture of alphabet pasta, I am going to eat it. I’m going to eat my words. I need you to organize it.”

I had just nursed the babies through the chicken pox and was exhausted. I closed my eyes to the bluelit bedroom and leaned against my pillow. “That’s wonderful, B. I’ll do my best,” I said as Sam cursed into the mattress.

Blythe gave a half-wailed, “Oh,” and put the phone down. I waited again at the front door, shivering with chill, but this time there was no squeal of tires or Blythe spinning merrily across the lawn. This time, there was a heavy silence all night and into the next few days, then a call from Pritch a week later, on Blythe’s birthday. The girls were out gathering armfuls of leaves from the lawn. I pressed my hand to the glass, as if to protect them, when he asked me to watch the boys for a week. Blythe had had another break, he’d said, and under his words, I understood that something terrible had happened. My core felt frozen, and I began to shiver.

“It was so strange, Harriet,” he said. “She was wearing this disgusting lace dress that she’d had since she was nine. It’s this horrible thing she couldn’t even zip up. As if that was part of a formula. Vodka, pills, dress. So strange. Such a goddamn cliché.”

I said soothing things, but mostly to keep myself from panicking, from throwing the phone across the room. He seemed calm, but when we’d already said good-bye, he said, “I forgot.” Now his voice seemed just on the edge of breaking. “Some big gallery downtown wants Blythe to come and do her newest piece. Darkling, I think she’s calling it.” Then, hesitant, “I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen anything she does. I won’t understand it, I’m not artistic, but I think I need to. Do I, Harriet? Should I look at the videos you made? Or should I read the work? Would that help?”

A long, cold moment passed before I could react. In one performance, Blythe had made a net of Pritch’s ties, and, catching herself in it, entangling herself, gave a monologue in which she used the lines “and wives are made / for fucking.” In another, she’d smeared red jelly across her face as she delivered a poem about one of her abortions. I had to turn away from my girls, whose hands were full of leaves burning red and orange, in the thinning afternoon. “Oh, Pritchard,” I said. “No, I really don’t think you should.”

All afternoon, watching the four children playing a board game, I couldn’t shake Pritch’s quaver out of my ears. I had been a bad friend. I had been too busy with my own life; I hadn’t taken care of Blythe. I could have stopped her free fall, if only I had been paying more attention. I knelt and buried my head in Bear’s mop of hair, ferociously breathing in his musky boy smell. Never, never would I make that mistake again, I promised. I would stop the despair the next time it came around and the next and the next, however long it took.

THAT WINTER AND SPRING I LEARNED the dark strain of recovery. Blythe at the hospital; home, but not allowed to be alone with the children; crying, gray and languid; then suddenly, as if infused with someone else’s blood, in a gallery, creating Darkling for a solemn audience. It was a long and painful piece: Blythe singing the same poem to herself as she ate the woman-shaped sculpture of alphabet noodles, until her voice cracked and her lips bled and she sank to a squat. She had insisted on performing it until Pritch and I had both caved in. When we did, she dimpled, kissed us both on the cheek, and we were charmed, despite ourselves.

Her slow recovery was sped by a front-page write-up of Darkling in the Arts section of the Inquirer. The reporter, a recent women’s college graduate, said her whole world shifted when she saw it. “Through Cantor’s work,” she rhapsodized, “we see the plight of the housewife in contemporary America, pulled between the competing obligations to her family and a career of her own, the sad legacy of women’s liberation in this new decade of ours. It is a terrific sight, and one this reporter won’t forget for a very long time.”

After that, Blythe still spoke in a little-girl voice at times, still clutched me too hard around the waist. But for long stretches, weeks at a time, she donned a personality she’d concocted for the reporters who came to interview her: brash, chain-smoking, hinnying like a horse, raw with sex. I liked this new Blythe. I was afraid of her. She appeared so hard, though all the while, if I was in the room, Blythe held my hand and stroked it.

I adored her, even during those dark hours when she’d turn herself off, slip vegetative into her sadness. I saw her vision, and it shook me. What talent I had was quiet and web-like, a connecting of seemingly scattered elements, while Blythe imprinted herself upon the world with a grandiosity that awed me. She had a vast generosity, a daring charm. She brought armfuls of Gerbera daisies into my house because, she said, they were beautiful and I was beautiful in the same way, ruddy and angular and strong; she mixed me drinks until we were drunk by the pool in the early afternoon; she slipped off her heels with the gold buckles and handed them to me because I loved them. She laughed when her boys turned to me with a wound, and allowed me the pleasure of comforting them. Those boys, with their translucent little faces, their wariness, the way they sidled up to me shyly whenever I was around, broke my heart.

One day, in late summer, in the ladies’ room at the zoo on an excursion with Blythe and the boys, Susan looked up at me with a grave frown as I tried to wrestle her pants up her legs. “Mom,” she said, “which kid do you love most: me or Mackenzie or Blythe?” And though I felt terribly guilty later, at that moment I only stared at my littlest and broke into a surprised roar, and didn’t end up answering my daughter at all.

THOSE FIRST FOUR YEARS I had only seen Blythe’s mother once, though Blythe and I were more like sisters than friends. I doubt Blythe had ever truly told her about our friendship. The old crone was fearsome. I discovered this only by accident; one day I’d hurried through a department store with my hands full of bargain goods — Mackenzie needed shoes, money was tight — and I saw Blythe at the café with an older woman. They were dressed in suits identical save for their different shades of blue. The older woman was Blythe with a thinner face, gray hair, a wicked bauble on her finger, and she was avoiding her daughter’s hungry stare by addressing her remarks to the embossed tin of the ceiling.

I approached, eager to introduce myself, but stopped when I heard the mother’s voice. It was clipped and cold. “Shameful, really,” she was saying. “I must speak out: your sisters fear you, you know, and Pritch is useless. Why would you wallow like a pig in your episodes? Why? I tried to come to one of your performances, you know, and couldn’t stay for more than a minute. So dark and ugly. Why must you insist on making yourself so ugly, rubbing things all over you, saying those horrible things? Blythe, darling, we all wish you wouldn’t, you know. They’re no one’s business. Your boys will never get away from them. You will end up making them just like you, and I, well…It’s simply unfair,” she said.

Her webbed eyes fell from their focus and she saw me standing behind Blythe, staring at her. I was holding Mackenzie’s hand so tightly the poor child was squirming. Blythe’s mother pursed her lips and narrowed her dark eyes, which were so like my Blythe’s, but hard where her daughter’s were liquid. I suddenly felt so dirty and ugly and vulgar with my cut-price shoes that I turned and fled, despite Mackenzie’s whining, despite my own curiosity. And from then on I couldn’t help grimacing whenever Blythe spoke of her mother, because she always did so in a voice redolent with love.

BY THE TIME MY GIRLS were in school I had stopped writing poetry. Blythe was already making great waves with her pieces, and in the maelstrom of her success I began to lose my love for my own poems. I make no excuses for myself: had I been a real poet, her fame wouldn’t have affected me at all. I would have kept on writing my quiet things, sending them out, collecting the rejections and rejoicing in the few acceptances. But under Blythe’s reflected light my poems seemed so paltry and meek. I kept my love for poetry in general and for the more serious fiction I was reading in gulps, and it was this love that made me return to school for a Ph.D. in English. I would still be thinking deeply of writing and art, would still be doing what my poetry had been doing, trying to connect distant pieces of the world and draw them closer.

I could never tell Blythe why I had stopped writing: she needed the fiction that I was there solely for her. “Without you, Harriet,” she’d cry in her exuberance after a performance, “I’d be nothing, nothing.” We both knew it was true; only I knew it was bittersweet, and that before making my decision, I spent long nights at the kitchen table, my eyes sandpapered with sadness.

The day I was accepted at UPenn, Sam said, “You, Harriet, are going to be the most overeducated mommy in the world,” and I couldn’t tell you then why that statement seemed to suck the air right out of me.

Her new celebrity made Blythe grow first indiscreet, then downright flippant, about her lovers. She even invited her most recent beau to a February party she threw to celebrate her new artist’s grant. He was a florid Montana painter, tall and moustached, so full of himself that he didn’t seem to notice the inappropriateness of his presence or the poisonous way Blythe grinned at Pritch all night. As at all of the Cantors’ parties, there was too much whiskey, too little food, too loud house music. Their parties had such an air of permissiveness that inevitably some actor would paw his pretty-boy date in the corner or some matronly woman would disapear conspicuously into the bathroom with a man decades younger than she was.

I should have put a stop to Blythe’s display, I knew. But I was drunk, loving the silver bangles that chittered on my wrists when I danced, celebrating my own minor victory: I’d just had my first book review accepted for publication. So I thought, Yummy, looking at the cowboy-painter, instead of I’d better go stop this nonsense, which was more like me.

Just before dawn the second-to-last couple staggered out with the Montana painter to give him a ride home. Sam and I were left to pick up the empty glasses and clean the ashtrays and turn off the music. In the new silence, Pritch’s and Blythe’s whispers boiled up into shouts in the kitchen. Sam seized my arm, pulling me to the door, but I shook free to listen.

“Had to bring him here, in front of our goddamn friends. In our goddamn house with our goddamn children sleeping upstairs,” Pritch said.

“What do you want me to do? I can’t touch you, Pritchard. You make me sick,” said Blythe. There was a horrible sound of hand against flesh, a fall, a shattering of glass. Sam and I ran to the kitchen. Blythe was sitting in a pile of broken tumblers, bleeding from her hands and clutching her left cheek.

Before we could rouse ourselves, Pritch bent down and scooped her up as if she were light as a doll. Blythe buried her face in her husband’s chest and threw her arms around his neck, murmuring, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Pritch gave me a stern look, then turned away, carrying Blythe upstairs. Sam cleaned up the blood, the glass, as I stood there, burning. We let ourselves out into the dove-gray dawn in silence, clutching each other’s hands with all the force we could muster.

Yet, when we were safe in bed that morning, I resisted sleep. All night there had been a strange lightness in me, and as I listened to Sam’s breath, I imagined vivid impossibilities. A dark bathroom, the heartbeat of a party downstairs, tile cold against my hands and knees. One silky moustache tickling my ear.

I NEVER GREW USED TO BLYTHE’S CRUMBLINGS, or how they could come along so suddenly. One happened before my eyes when we were thirty-eight, and Blythe had been manic for quite some time. She’d put a great deal of weight on her bones and though the lithium had given her odd twitchings, weird darts of her tongue, it made her skin glow and her sore chapped lips swell and ripen, a postcoital look.

Throaty, glittering, these were the years she was performing naked, glorying in her thick body, in her shame. She sat in a bathtub made of ice as she said, And the sweet wet slide of my son into water / a dive / how he beats like a pulse before bursting / into air. Severe, incantatory, she made an electric chair of willow rods as she repeated, Give us the brank / give us the switch / we are all witches / we terrible ones.

Blythe was still the darling of New York, of London, but I saw that she had begun to repeat herself, that her vision had narrowed, that she was growing only more extreme, not more subtle. I tried to tell her, but even small criticisms were treason to Blythe. She would shout so much that I learned to stay quiet and watch. I thought she would do what she wanted to no matter what I said; that I would be a better friend by being purely supportive.

The night of her collapse she was in an elegant gray silk suit, flushed and victorious from a performance that held the critics in thrall: these were her AIDS years, and she had black male models and white female models walking in a tight room, brushing up carnally against one another. Blythe was in the center, touching everyone who passed by like an enormous, ravenous spider. Afterward we had returned home to her Merion house, and she thrust open the French doors so the sunset threaded her bob with veins of bronze. In that moment, she had transformed into a figure of bliss. She turned to speak to me, to hold my face in her hands and kiss me on the forehead in her excess of joy, when the phone rang and she went to it, all a green-eyed dazzle.

Her face fell and she said “No” in a very low murmur. She grew pale, seemed to shrink, and her eyes darkened until they were black. The moment after Blythe hung up the phone and just before she looked at me and spoke of her mother’s sudden death, I couldn’t find my friend in her transformation into a dull and bloodless woman.

That was her most decided collapse yet. She grew querulous, fought more. She grew plumper, then outright fat, though her new flesh was creamy and somehow beautiful, making her even grander. Pritch stayed away from the house for as long as possible, as did the boys. Tom and Bear turned my rec room into a foot-smelling sanctuary for themselves, and they slept there, on a bunk bed I’d bought them, more nights than not. Once, despairing at her weight while Pritch was on a business trip, Blythe trashed all the food in her house, and the boys had no meals for a whole day until Tom called me, crying. She even turned on me when she seemed strong enough to do something bad and I stole her pills. She would throw glasses and lamps, whatever was at hand, until I fled.

It felt inevitable that I would come upon Blythe lying on the hideous dress on the sofa, senseless, so I was calm when I called the ambulance. Blythe had shouted at me when she awoke to the hospital’s buzz and bleachy sheen, “How dare you, Harriet? How dare you? You’re not my friend,” and she refused to talk to me for the three weeks she was in the hospital. Then one day she called to chat as if nothing had happened.

Those years I awoke at night many times in a panic of sweat, having dreamed of falling. Such constant urgency began to feel routine, Peter and the Wolf on repeat. I began to ignore the histrionics, and a few times refused to come to the phone when I sensed Blythe was on the other line and only mildly insane.

Then came the fall morning when the boys were at school and Blythe slipped from the house and drove to the Jersey shore, where her mother’s family had had a summer house for generations. She went to a cup of light at the top of the antique curving stairwell. In that smell of salt and fish, under the rattle of the bubbled windows, she slit her wrists, letting her blood dribble in rays down the stairs. But the man the family hired to check on the house grew suspicious on seeing Blythe’s car in the drive and entered, and she was saved, yet again.

THE CHILDREN WERE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL when Blythe began spreading rumors about herself. She was quite large by then, and reporters had stopped taking pictures of her. Plus, her newest performance was not going well. Africa had grown popular as a cause: the extent of the genocide in Rwanda was emerging, and Blythe had orchestrated a piece in which she’d “borrowed” Tutsi orphans, some as old as three, and put them naked in a close, white room, to be suckled by extremely pale women. The babies sobbed and soiled themselves and the women, though they had been told to hold still, grew anxious, wanting to clean the babies, to comfort them. I could only stand to see it for a minute before I walked out. The critics had the same reaction I did.

Blythe had always been a canny marketer; her new rumor campaign had a sort of sidewise brilliance. Some of what she spread was true, some was flagrantly untrue, but everything had an element of reality to it. These are only a few of the many rumors I heard:

That Blythe had found Christ by seducing a Catholic priest. True.

That Blythe had spent an entire semester as artist in residence at Bryn Mawr sitting with her back turned to her students and saying nary a word. Untrue.

That Blythe had found herself a lesbian lover. True; the lover was an unattractive fifty-year-old psychiatrist from Plymouth Meeting with whom she had a yearlong affair. At its denouement, the lover showed up at my house weeping, wanting me to explain Blythe to her. I could only give her some warm milk and send her home.

That Blythe had found herself wandering naked in South Philadelphia. Semi-true: she had been wandering naked, but it was on the Swarthmore campus.

That Blythe had had sexual urges for Tom, her son. This scared me the most. I longed to ask him, to make sure he was all right, but it is hard to meddle with a family, and I couldn’t hurt Blythe like that. I watched him and hoped. I still had faith in Blythe.

I had tried to protect Blythe from these rumors for a long time; I had no idea she was the one spreading them. But one day when she sat on my veranda, nursing a glass of ginger ale, she began telling me a strange dark fable in which, a year earlier, she had been abducted by a man at the grocery store, held for twenty-four hours in a small apartment, and repeatedly violated. She had given the man her engagement ring, and when he was out pawning it, she escaped, half-naked, and caught a ride home in a taxicab. She had actually rather enjoyed the escape, she said. I should tell my girls and any other woman I knew, she said, because that man could still be out there in this horrible world of ours.

She told me this, looking beyond me and nodding. I watched her, ill. There was no twenty-four-hour stretch in the past year when I hadn’t spoken to Blythe. There was no twelve-hour stretch. I was there when she lost her engagement ring down the pool filter, and cried for four hours, for fear of Pritch. Her story was horribly false.

But I knew what harm I could do by showing disbelief, and said, “That sounds awful,” then asked her how her Rwandan piece was doing.

She gave me her old dazzling smile and leaned forward. “Darling,” she said, “I’m doing it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m officially famous.”

She was, and she had been even before that moment, and she would remain so for these five years since. All this time Sam and I have become more comfortable, moved from Manayunk to a house in Rittenhouse Square, spent our weekends fixing it up. I gained some small celebrity with my critical pieces, perhaps mainly because I had tried to eschew the savagery that was so common in my field, and instead tried to locate the piece I was considering within the larger web of art, to consider it under those lights. I was afraid of what I would discover if I considered Blythe’s. I never did.

Blythe once read a piece of mine, a five-thousand-word essay in The New York Review of Books, then waved it at herself, as if it were a giant fan. She said, “This is great and all, but, Harriet, doesn’t it make you sad to do this kind of stuff? You were such a good poet, remember? Writing about writing just seems so, I don’t know. Meaningless. Or masturbatory, or what have you.”

I had to control my voice. “I think,” I said, “that criticism can be just as meaningful as the art it considers. It creates a dialogue.”

“Art creates dialogue,” said Blythe. “Critics are just vultures.” She watched my face with her sharp green eyes, then laughed. “Not you,” she said. “You’re too sweet for carrion.” She poured me another glass of iced tea and chattered away until my irritation dissolved and I found my resistances collapsing, found myself sinking into her again.

IN THE AUTUMN THIS PAST YEAR I went to Blythe’s house, prodded by a bad feeling, and found a spout of Pritch’s clothes issuing from the bedroom window, a hailstorm of shoes. Pritch was in the yard, red-faced, gathering his things from where they fell into the piles of leaves. “Harriet,” he spat when he saw me. “If she doesn’t do it herself, I swear to God I’m going to kill her.”

I looked at Pritch. He stood, his arms heaped with suits, and sighed. “She’s insisting that we get a divorce. Out of nowhere. Not to mention hypocritical for a born-again Catholic. I’m apparently the one that makes her crazy.”

“Oh, Pritch,” I said. “Oh, no.” His eyes were red-rimmed. I said, “You’re the one who keeps her sane.”

“You are,” he said. “We both know it.” Pritch dropped his face into the bundle of clothing and held it there for a long time. “Harriet,” he said, looking up at last, “I give up. I’m so tired. It’s up to you now, kid.” He walked to his car and shoved the things into the backseat, then sat on the bumper and buried his head in his hands again.

When I went inside, Tom was sitting on the stairwell. “Oh, Aunt Harriet,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Tom was seventeen, a beautiful boy though almost too graceful, with worry marks etched in his forehead. He still spoke with a lisp. Of all my children, and I include Blythe’s, he was the one who gave me heartache; his happiness seemed the least sure, his life to come the hardest. I gave him a kiss on the way upstairs, and he squeezed my hand as I passed. He smelled of pine and, surprisingly, jasmine.

When I opened Blythe’s door, she was in the middle of the floor, nude. She was pulling her hair with both hands. My friend had gained a great deal of weight again, and I looked at her body with a little thrill: my own aging one was so lumpy compared to hers. Her fat was smooth, her body beautifully large. I lay down beside her. She rolled over and buried her hot, wet face on my chest, and I rubbed her head until she calmed.

“I hate him,” she mumbled. I could feel her mouth move warm on my breast and, to my shame, felt my nipple harden. “I figured it all out. I wasn’t really crazy until I married him. And then I had his kids, and poof! I’m insane. I’m getting a divorce. I’m getting it tomorrow. Just wait and see.”

I just stroked her glossy hair, wondering when she’d begun to get those few white hairs, when the crows’-feet had pushed themselves more deeply beside her eyes. I didn’t know how to say that I was tired, too. I had just that morning refused a wonderful offer to teach in England, and had refused many more lectureships in the past, because I couldn’t be away from Blythe, for fear that her world would crash down and I wouldn’t be there to salvage what remained. I didn’t know how to say that I wished she could safely go to the beauty salon without me, to the grocery store, to the movies. That I wished she were a stranger, and I could walk away. That I wished to go to sleep for just one night without the fear of awakening into a shattered world.

I couldn’t say this, of course. So I said nothing.

For a long time we lay there as the sky darkened and small rain fell through the open window. Downstairs, we could hear Bear’s television nattering and Tom moving about the kitchen, making dinner. “Oh, Harriet,” she sighed into my chest. “My Harriet.” She drew her head up. Her eyes had gone slate gray and narrow. She leaned forward and gave me a long, lingering kiss. Her lips were very soft and tasted like whiskey.

I can’t say that I didn’t like it. I can’t say that somewhere in me, for twelve years, I had not longed for exactly that. To be, for a moment, the center. To, finally, take.

She nuzzled my cheek. When she gave a seductive little laugh, a laugh that spoke of practice, of seduction, I felt a break in me.

I pushed Blythe aside and stood, shaking. I went to the door. And I didn’t look around when I said, “Blythe, honey. Get dressed and come downstairs. Take a deep breath, and do whatever it is you want me to tell you to do.”

I left. My call awoke the kindly gentleman in England, who had been so disappointed when I’d refused the lectureship that morning. He was gracious and pleased that I had changed my mind. Weeks later, when the plane lifted from the runway for the transoceanic flight, I felt as if I were a great plant being ripped from the ground, roots snapping below me with great shudderings.

AT THE END OF THE TERM I flew home for Blythe’s party in honor of her grandest award yet. When the plane circled down into polluted, glorious Philadelphia, I felt I willed it down myself. But I didn’t have time to do much more than hug my girls, take one long look at my Rittenhouse Square garden, with its wisteria climbing the latticework, and then Sam and I hurried to the party. In the tight space of the car, my husband seemed a stranger to me, and we held the shyness of a first date between us, sweet and awkward.

“It’s been so hard without you,” he said when we turned into the driveway of the monstrous modern house in Paoli where the party was to take place. In his words I felt his giddy relief at my return. Then he added, “Not just me. All of us. Mack and Sue went nuts somehow. Blythe, too. Harriet,” he said, watching me in a sidelong way, “I’m afraid that Blythe is going again.”

I nodded. All summer I sensed a growing problem, and had called Blythe twice a week. And just before I returned to America, I received a package from my friend, two inches thick with her new piece she’d been creating at a white heat since spring. Bombing the Wreck, she called it. As far as I could tell, it was only a collection of loose, troublesome lines: and so I choose the bloodsnake / the writhing shades in the eggs it makes / curls like smoke and licks my life / for I have wearied so of water. The accompanying drawings for the performance made no sense to me: Blythe in a swimsuit, majestic, chained underwater in a great glass aquarium. This was not a performance. I didn’t quite know what it was.

The party was enormous, more than two hundred important people, and Blythe was late, of course. One hour rolled into two and I stood alone at the edge of the living room, growing furious. I could be with my girls, I thought: they had surprised me with how leggy they’d become in the few short months I’d been gone, and I wanted to touch them again, to know how they had changed. In the living room of the modern house, the cement walls had been scattered with random-seeming windows, and the party, growing edgier by the minute, was reflected back at itself. I searched the windows for a reflection of Sam’s dear bald pate, my one comfort, but couldn’t find him. I felt a little bereft at the lack.

At last, some of the guests began to slink home and the hostess finally gave up on Blythe. She gathered people at the buffet, though the meat was now rubbery, the shrimp pale, the potatoes cold.

Only then did the sliding doors thunder open, drowning out the light techno on the air. A jolt, a buzz, recognition: Blythe had arrived. I was too angry to look up, but heard her husky voice saying, “Oh, darlings, I am fearfully late, so sorry. A car crash! It was awful.”

The irritation in the room disappeared like smoke. I peered at Blythe in the concise reflection in the window. She wore a golden-brown velvet minidress, a thick gold cuff on her bicep, one arm in a sling. Her head was thrown back, hips forward, the good arm akimbo on her hip. All adazzle, as usual. She was magnificent, as shocking as she was that first night I saw her, if mainly because of the warp of the glass. I also knew that when I turned, I would see Blythe as she actually was, the lines on her thin skin, the lickings of her lips, the great broad bulk, the panic in the eyes whirling up as soon as she saw me, that need.

I thought: I will turn around now. I’ll pull her back again. I gave myself to the count of three, but kept counting to thirty, and didn’t turn. Come on, Harriet, I scolded myself. But I was so very weary. I just couldn’t do it. Not again.

Instead, I looked into the glass, into the darkness of the October night. I thought of how, out there in a Pennsylvania pond, near some sleeping farmhouse, there was probably one old catfish caught and released so often her gills were scarred and stiff, barely filtering the water anymore. When I took a step closer to the wall of windows, I saw my own face grow large and pale. Beyond, the moon and the dark lawn seemed to shrink the closer I came to them. I took another step, watched them shrink again. Blythe spoke, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I heard the hunger in them.

I would release her. She’d swim into whatever dark and terrible place she needed to go. I could do no more. I took one more step toward my face, toward the landscape, a chill draft from the loose casing stroking my cheek. One more step. Then I watched it all, miraculously, bloom.